by J F Straker
‘Well, I can’t. It’s in your name.’
‘I doubt if that’s an obstacle. Ask your solicitor.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘I’m not making a spot decision. Who’s sharing the flat with you?’
‘Con Leroy.’
‘Do I know her?’
‘No.’
He put the problem to Woolmer on the solicitor’s next visit. He wasn’t keen on letting, he said, but the house couldn’t be left empty and the money would be useful. No doubt it could be arranged, Woolmer said; who were Anne’s solicitors? Connor didn’t know. But time was not important, he said with some bitterness, he had plenty of that. He would check with Anne on her next visit.
There was no next visit. Just a letter. Con Leroy was a man, she wrote, not a girl. They had met at a party shortly before the trial, and because she found him sexually attractive she had later spent the occasional night with him. Knowing her as he did, Connor should not be surprised at that; neither of them was the celibate type, and although forcibly deprived of sex himself he must have realised that sooner or later she would take a lover. Well, now she had. To begin with there had been no thought that the relationship might become permanent; but for the past month she and Con had been living together, and attraction had blossomed into love. Now they wished to marry; would Connor give her a divorce? If he refused, hoping she might be persuaded into changing her mind — well, she wouldn’t. His imprisonment had something to do with it, of course, inasmuch as if it had not happened she might not have met Con. But she had never felt for him the way she now felt for Con, and even if he were free she would not go back to him. It was sad but true, and she hoped he would forgive her — and in time, perhaps, forget her.
Connor put down the letter. Sex was important to Anne, she needed it like she needed food and drink and air. It was important to him too but, as she said, it was temporarily denied him. Normal sex, anyway; he had been offered the other and had instantly rejected it as unnatural and obscene. Anne was free, she had a choice; and although he had been too deeply immersed in his own misery to give much thought to his wife’s needs he had recognised that she might take a lover. But never in his darkest moments had it occurred to him that the affair could be more than temporary, and her request for a divorce hit him hard. He started several letters, pleading with her to visit him and discuss the matter; but he knew it would be useless and the letters were never finished. The house was now his only link with life outside the prison, and without Anne to share it it lost its importance. In her letter she had given the name and address of her solicitor, and after a fortnight of painful indecision he told Woolmer to make the necessary arrangements for a divorce and, if she still wished it, for the sale of the house and its contents.
*
He thought about Anne as he walked back to his hotel. Financially she had been generous. The sale had shown a surplus of nearly eight thousand pounds after paying off the mortgage, and although the money had been legally hers she had handed half of it to Woolmer on Connor’s behalf. He had not written to thank her; he had left that to Woolmer. Nor had he tried to see her on his release. He had gone straight from prison to stay with his father. You’ll need time to readjust, his father had said, and a farm is as good a place as any in which to do so. Connor had thought the advice sound; but after a week he had grown restless and had come up to Town to discover where he stood with Kessler. Well, now he knew. Kessler, it seemed, didn’t want to know — neither now nor, despite the apparently encouraging noises, in the future. He would have to look elsewhere for employment. But that must wait. Before coming to grips with the future he must settle the past.
Kessler’s offices were in Holborn, Connor’s hotel in Kensington. It was a long walk; but he was in no hurry and it was good to be moving among free people with not a screw or a prison wall in sight. As he neared Bond Street his steps slowed, and for a few moments he stood irresolute, jostled by hurrying shoppers. Anne worked in Bond Street — or used to. A woman’s shopping bag caught him a glancing blow. It prodded him into action, and he turned and walked slowly down the street towards the agency.
‘Mrs. Connor?’ The man behind the brochure-festooned counter shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, sir. There’s no one of that name here. Perhaps I can help you?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Connor said. He was turning away when he realised his mistake. ‘Oh, I forgot. She remarried. Her name’s Leroy now, not Connor.’
‘Anne Leroy? Oh yes, she used to work here. But she left. Must be a good three years ago.’
‘Do you have her address?’
‘It’s probably on file in the office. I’ll ask.’
‘No.’ Suddenly he was glad she wasn’t there. It had been a mistake to come. For nearly four years they had had no contact. She was married to another man; she was probably a mother as well as a wife. What could they say to each other that would not embarrass? ‘Leave it. I just happened to be passing and remembered she worked here. But it’s not important.’
He left for Felborough by train the next morning.
Chapter 2
He booked a room at the Malt House in the name of James Mallorie; Mallorie had been his mother’s maiden name. The receptionist was new, but he was glad to see that Harry Baynes still worked in the cellar bar. Harry was a link with the past, and it was the past he had come to investigate. Kessler had made it clear that a conviction for manslaughter and six years in gaol was a severe handicap to employment, and Kessler knew Connor’s worth. If Kessler was not prepared to stomach that conviction, who would? As Connor saw it, perhaps the only sure way to establish his innocence would be to unmask the real killer, and quite how he was to do that was obscure; after so many years the trail, even if he were to find it, would be thickly overgrown. But he had to try. And by no means insignificant was the knowledge that if by some miracle he succeeded it would be a slap in the face for Brummit. Year after year, lying on his bed or exercising in the prison yard or working in the metal shop, he had devoted thought to the problem of revenging himself on Brummit. Yet short of physical assault, which would land him back in gaol, how did one avenge oneself on a police superintendent? Woolmer might say that Connor had his priorities wrong, that his anger was misplaced; that Brummit had only been doing his duty as he saw it, that he was no more responsible for Connor’s ordeal than the Crown counsel for prosecuting or the jury for convicting or the judge for pronouncing sentence. That wasn’t how Connor saw it. Brummit had needed an arrest to bolster his sagging reputation, and because Connor had been the first suspect that offered he had seized on him and had looked no further. Without Brummit the nightmare would never have started. To expose him as an incompetent policeman — perhaps even a corrupt one — might not be sufficient recompense for nearly six years of wrongful imprisonment, but it would at least be something.
He spent that first evening in the cellar bar, talking to Harry Baynes and scrutinising the faces of the other customers in the hope that he might recognise one or more who had been there the night Becky died. Why she had been killed was a mystery — with a woman such as Becky there could be many reasons — but there was the possibility that, seeing her with Connor and realising he would be taking her home, the killer had left earlier to wait for her in the wood, and had later deposited her body in the ditch to give substance to the natural assumption that Connor had killed her. Unless he had deliberately chosen a stranger as the fall guy in preference to a friend or an acquaintance, or unless urgency had forced him to seize the first opportunity that offered, Connor’s involvement must have been due entirely to chance. But his scrutiny was unavailing. If any of the customers present had been in the bar that September night he did not recognise them. And it was early days to start questioning Harry. He had first to establish some sort of rapport with the man.
‘Staying long, Mr. Mallorie?’ Harry asked, after their second drink together.
‘That depends,’ Connor said. ‘A week or two, anyway.’
�
��Business, is it?’
‘Sort of. Tell me, where can I hire a car? Self-drive, I mean?’
‘There’s Godman’s garage,’ Harry said. ‘Opposite the station. I don’t know where else you’d get a self-drive.’ He poured beer for a customer. ‘Know the town, do you?’
‘Vaguely,’ Connor said. ‘But from way back. It seems to have grown.’
‘Still growing. Eighteen years ago, when I first come here — I was just a kid then, mind you — it was a poky old place. Now — well, look at it.’
‘I intend to,’ Connor said.
He hired a car from Godman’s Garage the next morning and drove out to Woodside Cottage. He could still recall Brummit’s bony finger pin-pointing it on the map, and although he took a few wrong turnings he found it eventually and parked where he had parked with Becky. He recognised the tall hedges that lined the lane and the bushes concealing the bank down which he had fallen. There was the sharp bend ahead and the cart track on the opposite side of the lane that led, according to Brummit, to a derelict farmhouse; Ewen’s Farm, if a crudely lettered fingerpost was correct. Over to his left was the wood he had seen on the map. It hid the cottage from the lane, and he got out of the car and set off along the track that Becky must have taken.
The cottage was a disappointment: a red brick villa, slate roofed and wire fenced. On the assumption that Mrs. Main would be more communicative on her own he had chosen to visit her while her husband was at work, and when she opened the door to him he explained that he was a writer commissioned by his publisher to compile a book on modern criminal trials in which there was a possibility that justice had been misplaced. Her daughter’s death, he said, and the subsequent conviction of James Connor on a charge of manslaughter, was among those he was investigating.
‘Misplaced?’ She leaned to peer at him through bottle lenses. A short, fat little woman in her sixties, Connor saw nothing to remind him of Becky. ‘How d’you mean, then?’
‘I mean there now appears to be some doubt of his guilt.’
‘He done it,’ she said, with complete conviction.
‘Perhaps,’ Connor said, repressing his anger. What right had she to condemn him? ‘But publishers need to sell books and doubt creates interest.’
She could not or would not tell him more than he already knew about the dead woman’s male acquaintances. Could not, he thought; if her daughter had ever confided in her the little she knew had gone with the years. What had happened to Becky’s personal possessions? Connor asked. They had sold anything worth selling, she said, the rest had gone to the jumble. Letters, papers — anything like that? A few, she said. How about a bank account? Yes, she said, Becky had had a bank account. She had started it when her Aunt Ellen died and left her two hundred pounds. ‘I don’t think she used it much,’ Mrs. Main added. ‘’Cept to take money out, of course.’
Connor was interested. ‘Have you still got these documents?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to see them if I may.’
‘They’re upstairs,’ she said. ‘But I don’t know as Tom — you’d be putting her in the book, would you?’
‘Yes.’
‘And us too? Me and Tom?’
‘Yes. But there would be nothing to which you or your husband could take exception. I promise you that.’
‘I’ve never been in a book.’ There was a moment of indecision. ‘All right, then, I’ll get them. I don’t suppose Tom’d mind. Not if you just want to look at them.’
The documents were in a cardboard box and consisted of a few letters, none of which interested Connor: some colour snapshots of Becky, most of them taken on a beach: a bank chequebook and credit book: and, to Connor’s incredulous delight, a small pocket diary. The entries in the diary were spasmodic, written in a neat childish hand, and were mainly cryptic references to what Connor assumed to be Becky’s various dates. At a rough glance it seemed that no names were mentioned, only initials; and although it was difficult in some instances to distinguish the capitals, since some were in block letters and others merely enlarged lower case, it seemed that the most prevalent initial in the weeks immediately prior to her death was the letter B. Connor was seized with the wild thought that B could stand for Brummit: that Brummit had been meeting Becky, had perhaps even killed her. He knew it was an improbable assumption, born of his eagerness to uncover something, anything, to Brummit’s discredit. But it was not completely impossible; not in Connor’s biased view. And if it were true it would explain Brummit’s failure to look elsewhere for a possible culprit, his eagerness to keep the investigation within narrow bounds. To extend those bounds could have been to disclose his own culpability.
The bankbooks were more positive in their information. Becky had been meticulous in completing the cheque stubs, and if they were correct the last time she had drawn money had been on the 8th of July. The cheque had been for £20, made out to self, leaving her with a credit balance of £57.4s.11d. Previous to that she had not written a cheque for over a year. The credit book too made odd reading. The account had obviously been opened in 1965 with the £200 from Aunt Ellen. Since then, according to the counterfoils, only seven sums of money had been credited to the account; all in cash, and the first four at widely separated intervals and none for more than fifteen pounds. It was the last three credits that intrigued Connor. Each was for twenty pounds, and they had been paid in during the month prior to Becky’s death. Why the sudden affluence?
Mrs. Main shook her head when he showed her the book. She couldn’t read, she said. Neither could her husband; they’d neither of them had much schooling. Connor asked her about the last three credits. Could Becky have started to bank her wages?
‘Twenty pounds?’ She looked surprised. ‘Oh, no! Becky never told us what she earned, but she said it wasn’t much. That’s why she only give me three pounds a week for her keep. She worked at the Zoo because she liked animals. Not for the money. She’d get better wages in a shop, she said, or a factory.’
Connor put the documents back in the box. ‘Do you think I might hang on to these for a week or two?’ he asked. ‘I’d like to study them more closely.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Anyways, I’d have to ask Tom. I couldn’t do it without —’
She peered at the five pound note in his hand. ‘You don’t want to keep them for good?’
‘No. Just borrow them.’
‘Oh! Well, if you think it’s important. For the book, I mean —’
‘It could be,’ Connor said. ‘Very important.’
‘All right,’ she said, reaching for the note. ‘Do you want the letters too? And the bill?’
‘What bill?’
She didn’t know what bill. It was just that it looked like a bill. ‘It’s in the box.’
‘No bill here,’ Connor said, searching.
‘Isn’t it? No, that’s right — it weren’t with the other things. I come across it later, you see, when I was sorting her clothes and such. After the trial, that was.’ She frowned. ‘Now, where did I —? Ah, yes. I remember now. In the drawer. I’ll get it, shall I?’
‘Please.’
He heard her moving heavily up the stairs. She returned with a piece of paper that turned out to be a receipt, not a bill. It was for the sum of thirty-five pounds, paid to a firm of Felborough furriers as deposit on a mink jacket valued at three hundred and fifty pounds. The date on the receipt was September the 16th, 1968.
‘I won’t bother with the letters,’ Connor said. ‘Or the snapshots. But I’ll take the rest, if I may.’ He picked up the box. ‘I suppose the police saw these?’ She shook her head. ‘Didn’t they ask to see them?’
‘Oh, yes, they asked. There was reporters here too. Lots of ’em. And the police searched her room.’
‘So why didn’t they see these?’
She had hidden them, she said. Not knowing what they contained she had hidden them, fearful that there might be entries detrimental to her daughter’s memory and that these might be reported in the newspapers or mentioned at t
he trial. ‘I didn’t want that, did I?’ she said. ‘All them nosey parkers! I mean, them things was private.’
‘You were perverting the course of justice,’ Connor accused. ‘Didn’t you realise that?’
‘Why? That man done it. There wasn’t nothing in them books and things made any difference.’
Was that true? Connor wondered. What would Brummit have made of the documents had he been permitted to see them? Would he have appreciated their possible significance? Or was he already so convinced of Connor’s guilt — or so determined to assume it — that he would have dismissed them as irrelevant to the crime? The latter, Connor suspected. Yet he felt a rising anger against the woman. There was the possibility, however remote, that her concern for her daughter’s memory had robbed him of his wife, his job, and six years of normal living. Even if Brummit had ignored the documents — even if investigation proved he would have been right to ignore them — it was conceivable that Perfect could have used them to cause doubt in the minds of the jury.
‘Perhaps,’ he said curtly. ‘But if that’s the way you feel why show them to me?’
She shrugged. ‘You said you wouldn’t print nothing we didn’t like. Anyways, it’s a long time ago, isn’t it? Folks have forgotten. It don’t matter so much.’
It was a shrewd observation. Or had the fiver been the deciding factor?
‘Fair enough,’ he said, curbing his anger. Right or wrong, it was water under the bridge. Now this —’ he showed her the furrier’s receipt. ‘This is a receipt for a down payment on a fur coat, made out for September the 16th. That was two days before your daughter was killed. I suppose she didn’t actually complete the purchase?’
If she did, Mrs. Main said, she hadn’t brought it home.
Even in daylight, Connor decided as he walked back to the car, the wood could provide cover for a would-be assassin. At night it would be ideal. But the cottage was isolated, several miles from the nearest village. Unless the murderer was a local man, how had he got there? There had been no other car in the lane; he hadn’t seen one, Giles Rushby hadn’t seen one. The solution seemed to lie in the track to Ewen’s Farm. A car parked there would not be seen by anyone coming from the main road. Parked far enough up the track it would also be hidden from the opposite direction. Had Brummit considered that? Obviously not. Or if he had he had decided not to investigate. Yet an investigation then might have revealed tracks that could have led to the real killer.
